Welcome! You have accidentally reached the blog of a heteroclite follower of Jesus: dave wainscott. I'm
"pushing toward the unobvious" as I post thinkings/linkings
re: Scripture, church and culture. Hot topics include: temple tantrums, time travel, sexuality/spirituality, U2kklesia, role of the pastor, God-haunted music/art..and subversive videos like these.

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Wednesday, January 25, 2017

"I was in England during World War I, moneyless and miserable. My wife, who is younger and more courageous than I am, said 'Let's go to a museum for relief.' There was destruction in the whole world. Not only were bombs being dropped on London--but every day we heard of another city being destroyed. Devastation, ruins, the annihilation of a world becoming poorer and sadder. That was bitter. I looked at Rembrandt's last self-portrait: so hideous and broken; so horrible and hopeless; and so wonderfully painted. All at once it came to me: to be able to look at one's fading self in the mirror--see nothing--and paint oneself as the néant,the nothingness of man. What a miracle, what an image! In that I found courage and new youth. 'Holy Rembrandt,' I said. Indeed, I owe my life only to the artists."-Oskar Kokoschka, in Horst Gerson, Rembrandt Paintings, p. 478. Told in Henri Nouwen and Walter Gaffen's "Aging," p. 91

Saturday, January 07, 2017

"No flippies. Scripture interprets Scripture, sure, but
the main focus of the way I study the Bible is to draw meaning from the
text at hand. That means no flipping to other chapters,
unless you’re told otherwise. Most Christians love to toss out the
“Scripture interprets Scripture” line, but in practice it becomes an
excuse for what I call “concordance exegesis”: using a concordance to
interpret the text rather than the nouns and verbs in their various
ascending circles of context (sentence, paragraph, pericope, logical
argument, book, testament, theology, history, geography). One should never
use one verse to “interpret” another just because they share a common
term in an English translation. Dragging the meaning of terms from one
passage, in an entirely different context, into another, is a guaranteed
way to misunderstand whatever text is currently in front of
your eyes. It’s a horrible interpretive habit that has become
sanctified simply because it’s common."link 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 – An interactive Bible Study

Sunday, January 01, 2017

Xenochrony is a studio-based musical technique developed at an unknown date, but possibly as early as the early 1960s, by Frank Zappa,
who used it on several albums. Xenochrony is executed by extracting a
guitar solo or other musical part from its original context and placing
it into a completely different song, in order to create an unexpected
but pleasing effect. He said that this was the only way to achieve some rhythms.

Temporality, Intentionality, and Authenticity in Frank Zappa’s Xenochronous Worksby Andre Mount;Excerpt:TemporalityTo the uninformed listener, there is no strong evidence to suggest that Zappa’s “Friendly Little Finger,” from the 1976 album Zoot Allures,[4] is anything other than a recorded document of an ensemble performance.The piece begins with a brief introduction featuring a repeated riff
performed on guitar, marimba, and synthesizer. An extended improvisation
with electric guitar, bass, and drums fills out the lengthy middle
section before the track concludes with a quotation of the Protestant
hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves,” arranged for a trio of brass
instruments. Despite its apparent normalcy, however, “Friendly Little
Finger” combines materials from four distinct sources spanning three
years of Zappa’s career.The primary recording—a guitar solo with a droning bass
accompaniment—was recorded in the dressing room of the Hofstra
University Playhouse as a warm-up before a performance on October 26,
1975. Several months later, Zappa added an unrelated drum track
originally intended for use on a different song (“The Ocean is the
Ultimate Solution”[5])
and a second bass part recorded at half speed. These three recordings,
all appearing in the middle solo section, comprise the xenochronous core
of the piece. To this, Zappa superimposed two additional recordings.
The introduction comes from the same session as the added bass part, and
the coda was recorded several years earlier, during a session for the
song “Wonderful Wino.”As Example 1 makes clear, the result of Zappa’s editing is a
moderately dense network of temporally disjunct recordings. How is it
that such seemingly disparate recordings happened to come together in
this way? What inspired Zappa to take such an approach to manipulating
recorded sound? Of course, examples of overdubbing in American popular
music can be found at least as far back as the 1940s—recall Sidney
Bechet’s One Man Band recordings in which each instrument was performed
separately by Bechet himself. But while such tricks had become old hat
by the mid 1970s, xenochrony stands out for it also has obvious ties to
the twentieth-century art-music avant-garde.Despite his continuing reputation as a popular musician, Zappa was
remarkably well read in the theoretical discourse surrounding
avant-garde art music, particularly with regards to musique concrète and
tape music. He expressed an ongoing interest in John Cage’s chance
operations, for example, trying them out for himself by physically
cutting recorded tapes and rearranging the pieces at random for the 1968
album Lumpy Gravy.[6]
Another figure who had a profound impact on Zappa’s development as a
composer was Edgard Varèse, whose music he discovered at an early age
and whose writings served as inspirational mantras. Given this
fascination with the avant-garde, xenochrony may be best understood as a
conscious attempt by Zappa to model himself on these influential
figures. His own approach to music and composition would therefore
require an analogous theoretical foundation.Xenochrony is closely tied to Zappa’s conception of temporality.
Zappa often described time as a simultaneity, with all events occurring
at once instead of chronologically. Toward the end of his life, in an
oft-quoted conversation with cartoonist Matt Groening, Zappa explained
that the idea was rooted in physics:

I think of time as a spherical constant, which means that
everything is happening all the time. […] They [human beings] take a
linear approach to it, slice it in segments, and then hop from segment
to segment to segment until they die, and to me that is a pretty
inefficient way of preparing a mechanical ground base for physics.
That’s one of the reasons why I think physics doesn’t work. When you
have contradictory things in physics, one of the reasons they became
contradictory is because the formulas are tied to a concept of time that
isn’t the proper model.[7]

Bob Marshall: In your work with "xenochrony", are you satirizing
editing, the way you put things together, besides the
technical innovation of doing it?

Frank Zappa: "Xenochrony" means strange synchronizations. Am I
satirizing editing? I don't know whether the technical
process of editing is enough of a commonly understood
phenomenon that you could satirize it. You can't made a joke
about something that people don't know exists. So, I would
say that's not part of it.

Bob Marshall: How would you relate "xenochrony" to the time/rate thing
we discussed earlier?

Frank Zappa: Well, a classic "xenochrony" piece would be "Rubber
Shirt", which is a song on the SHEIK YERBOUTI album. It takes
a drum set part that was added to a song at one tempo. The
drummer was instructed to play along with this one particular
thing in a certain time signature, eleven-four, and that drum
set part was extracted like a little piece of DNA from that
master tape and put over here into this little cubicle. And
then the bass part, which was designed to play along with
another song at another speed, another rate in another time
signature, four-four, that was removed from that master tape
and put over here, and then the two were sandwiched together.
And so the musical result is the result of two musicians, who
were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two
different rates in two different moods for two different
purposes, when blended together, yielding a third result which
is musical and synchronizes in a strange way. That's
xenochrony. And I've done that on a number of tracks.

Bob Marshall: What is the idea behind that? Or is it just an
interesting sound?

Frank Zappa: What is the idea behind it? Suppose you were a composer
and you had the idea that you wanted to have a drum set
playing expressively and intuitively, eleven-four, at a
certain tempo while an electric bass player is doing exactly
the same thing in another tempo in another time signature, and
you want them to do this live on stage and get a good
performance. You won't get it. You can't. You can ask for
it, but it won't happen. There's only one way to hear that,
and that's to do what I did. I put two pieces of tape
together.

Gerald Fialka: Do you realize it by chance though? Or do you say "I'm
going to try this"?

Frank Zappa: That's what I do every day. I'm going to try this, and the
stuff that works you keep and the stuff that doesn't you throw
it away. I thought that one worked. That's why it's on the
record Link

Dumb disclaimer:

It should go without saying...but i wouldn't want it to... that since this blog is a Spiritaneous place to throw out thoughts/feelings/articles "in process," it does not represent any of the fine institutions you see by my profile that I am affiliated with (Heck, it may not even represent me! (:........). The blog is merely an attempt to subvert subversion and "push toward the unobvious" (Thanks, Tim N. for that phrase) on the six hot topics listed at the top of the page....Welcome, engage it, and don't be offended (for the wrong reason, anyway!)